The Public As Public Intellectual: Public Opinion As a Presence In Canadian Discourse By Michael Adams

This paper is a contribution to The Public Intellectual In Canada, a book of essays edited by Nelson Wiseman of the University of Toronto, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press in 2012. Please do not cite or circulate without the express written permission of the author.

The Public As Public Intellectual: Public Opinion As a Presence In Canadian Discourse By Michael Adams When I was invited to contribute to this volume I hesitated, not seeing myself as a public intellectual. Public intellectuals do their own thinking. As a pollster, I tend to scavenge other people's thinking: asking questions, aggregating the responses, and reporting on what they have said. Nor did I have any great insight to offer about public intellectuals as a class, although I did toy with the hypothesis that Canada has too many publics regional, demographic and psychographicto really elevate our intellectuals into national public figures in the way that, say, France or even the United States might. These disclaimers notwithstanding, I think there might be some value in reflecting on how polling and related punditry have evolved over the course of my career, and what contributions they might make to the kinds of social and policy discussions that public intellectuals often try to spark or advance. I have come to believe that the data we pollsters produce can catalyze discussion and action among the engaged public, and that in this sense, the data pollsters gatherespecially if they gather it through a thoughtful and rigorous processcan fulfill some of the same functions as persuasive prose from an accessible academic or a respected journalist. In other words, I think public opinion data itself might be a kind of public intellectual presence in our society: not the singular voice of an expert individual, but the collective voice of the society or some group within it. My sense of the value of survey research has changed a great deal over time. I have always been fascinated by it, but as a young man I was more interested in the "insider" quality of polling. In high school, I dreamed of being Lou Harris to some Canadian version of JFK. I aspired to sit around a war-room table in the middle of the night, the trusted alchemist of public opinion, parsing the numbers and trying to understand what the general public was really trying to tell us, and what we should do about it. Devising brilliant political stratgies for a charismatic, idealistic politician seemed to my young mind the highest use to which public opinion data could be put.

As I got older and founded my own research company, I was less attracted to the idea of political battle but still assumed that the audience for my research would be a small group of expert insidersa business seeking to woo a new market segment, a human resources officer trying to court or retain the best and brightest, or a government department trying to determine how best to serve its citizens. For many years I and my colleagues gathered survey data with these small audiences in mind, offering our clients a window onto public attitudes through the use of the random sample, the innovation for which George Gallup became famous after he correctly predicted the outcome of the 1936 presidential election in the United States with his small but representative samples of the American voting public. Intermittently, I and my fellow pollsters would conduct election horse-race polling, competing to have the most accurate analysis of what the public was thinking and how the race would play out. The public and therefore the media were interested in these numbers, and punditry began to come with the territory of polling. (My first encounter with television punditry was during the 1984 federal election as a leaders debate commentator on a panel hosted by CBC star journalist Barbara Frum.) Still, intoning each days electoral horse-race numbers was a fairly mechanical affair, as it still is. Pollsters merited the name "public intellectual" about as much as the meteorologist on the evening news did: both offered valuable information and a little analytical nuance as necessary, but neither was likely to offer the Big Idea of the day. It was not until I wrote my first book, Sex in the Snow, that I came to appreciate how intrigued members of the general public were by the attitudes of their fellow citizens not just about how they were going to vote next week, but what they wanted for their society and how they saw the world around them. It has not always been taken for granted that people want to know what other ordinary citizensnot just experts, elites, and public intellectualsthink.

I had assumed early in my career that those who would be most interested in our research findings were those who had something commercial or political to gain from understanding society better. Before we began working on Sex in the Snow, which featured not just ordinary polling but a more complex methodology that measured social values, I and my colleagues found the analytics to be fascinating and our clients found it extremely illuminating. But I had to be talked into writing a book about it: I didn't imagine that the average Canadianeven the average curious, readerly Canadian would want to read about our segmentation analyses. True, not everyone wanted to read about Canadian social values. But the publisher was right about public interest and I was wrong: the book sold over 24,000 copies, which came as a happy surprise. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that engaged Canadians would be attracted to the data. Public opinion research holds a mirror up to society; most of us, passing a mirror, can't help but take a peek. During this time some of my colleagues also began wading deeper into social and political analysis. Allan Gregg went beyond the standard talking-head role and began hosting a public affairs show on TV Ontario. Others, such as Frank Graves and newly minted poll sponsor and interpreter, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning have appeared with some regularity in op-ed pages. They, too, recognized the demand for information about public opinion not only among elites but among engaged citizens. By the time I began writing about our research for the general public, Environics had been using the social values method for over a decade, surveying Canadians about concepts that did not appear in ordinary polling and using their answers to slot them into segments or "tribes" as we called them.1 As the tribes became more widely known, friends and acquaintances began to ask me a funny question: "What am I?" They wanted
1

A mention of our social values work is an opportune time to note that my work in the public forum is underpinned by the work of a large number of people at Environics. My data and some of the related insights come from the methodological, analytical, and managerial capacity of the company I founded: Doctors David Jamieson (our chief scientist), Barry Watson, Keith Neuman and Donna Dasko have made invaluable contributions, and my colleague in writing projects, Amy Langstaff, has helped me to articulate many of our findings over the years. Partners such as Jan Kestle (Environics Analytics), Claude Theoret (Nexalogy Environics) and Jen Evans (Sequentia Environics) in new branches of the Environics family also help amplify and analyze the voices of Canadians in their own fascinating ways and share the results.

me to put them in a tribe, to offer them an on-the-spot sociocultural diagnosis based on my knowledge of their personalities and beliefs, like someone guessing people's weight at a county fair. Sometimes I would tell people to go and fill out our abbreviated values survey online. Sometimes I would give my "expert" assessment on the spot, reminding them that we were more in the territory of the Amazing Kreskin than of social science. (Admittedly, I rarely tell anyone I think they are an Aimless Dependant, especially after dark.) What I took from this recurring experience was that thoughtful people are not only curious about the world, they are curious about themselves. To study survey data-whether our social values data or political horse-race polling--is to learn about yourself in the context of your society. When people asked me "What am I?" they were, of course, not expecting some penetrating existential insight. They were asking "Where do I fit in this society? Who is like me? Who is unlike me? What do I share with my fellow citizens? What do you see in your conversation with a random sample that I can't see in my conversations with friends and family, or in reading the analyses of newspaper columnists?" (This was 1997, long before the social media explosion, which still does not offer a random sample but does give ordinary people much more information than they had before about what others like them are saying and doing.) It is my sensethough I cannot prove itthat pollsters enjoy greater prominence and respect in Canada than they do in many other societies. If this is true, it is not because the quality of our pollsters is better, but because pollsters role in our society is different and perhaps more necessary: because of Canadas geographic size and social diversity, we have a limited number of ways to get to know each other as Canadians, and polls are one obvious way of getting a snapshot of the whole society. Survey data can help us try to imagine what it's like to be somebody else in our society: an immigrant, someone living in another region of Canada, someone whose economic circumstances are different from our own. It can also help us see where our own attitudes and interests fit in a broader social context. Am I in the mainstream or am I an outlier?

Survey data can also help us to see ourselves, for all our internal diversity, as a society distinct from other societies. The work of mine that received the most attention was my 2003 book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. In addition to its fortuitous timing (the book came out at a time when the Chretien government and the Bush administration were traveling in opposite directions on a few high-profile issues, including the Iraq War) the book seemed to attract people with both its cross-national (Canada-US) comparison, and its longitudinal comparisons (looking at both societies over time). These two approaches answer a couple of questions that any societybut especially one living at a time of rapid political and technological change is bound to seek answers to: who are we, and what are we becoming? Many public intellectuals reflect on those questions by bringing deep understandings of historical context to bear on contemporary issues, or by sharing their expertise about the workings of other societies. In my case, I simply marshaled the social values data we had gathered on behalf of our clients over the years, and made an argument about what I thought the numbers were saying when taken together and seen from 35,000 feet. If Sex in the Snow caused me to realize how curious engaged Canadians were about where they fit into the values landscape of their society, Fire and Ice convinced me that engaged Canadians cared deeply about the values that united Canada and made it distinct from other societieseven those as ostensibly similar to us as our nearest neighbour and largest trading partner. Of course, some commentators disagreed strongly with the conclusions I drew in Fire and Ice, but for the most part their claim was not that Canada was without shared values that distinguished them from Americans, but that my research had focused on the wrong ones. Much more important than whether Canadians and Americans felt the same about gender equality or the acceptability of everyday violence, some argued, was whether we believed in concepts like democracy and the rule of law. Although I spoke to people with vastly different ideas about shared values in Canada, I found that most engaged people had some interest in reflecting on values that might serve as some kind of connective tissue among citizens, and also in how our values might be evolving over time and what this meant for our laws and institutions. The more I spoke to people about our research, the more convinced I became that public opinion

research was not only an invaluable tool for marketing managers, politicians, and public servants, but also a means of fostering introspection and empathy in a diverse democratic society. It was this growing sense of the value of survey data as a tool for enhancing our civic life that caused me to found the Environics Institute, a non-profit entity whose mission is to survey those not usually heard from, posing questions not usually asked. The first time I was inspired to conduct a survey not for current or prospective clients but simply to contribute to the national dialogue was in 2006. A number of events in the news, from terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe to the arrests of eighteen men in Mississauga (the "Toronto Eighteen" as they came to be known) had sparked considerable debate about the links between Islam and extreme political ideologies, and whether Muslim immigrants were integrating successfully into societies in Western Europe and North America. The more newspaper columnists and assorted talking heads (some said to be "representatives" or "spokespeople" of the Muslim community in Canada) debated the state of Muslims and other religious minorities in Canada, the more I wanted to hear from Canadian Muslims themselves. "If we want to know what these people think," I thought as the experts offered their hypotheses, "why don't we ask them?" Of course, it is not as simple as that. You can ask one person to express in their own words what they think about an issue. You cannot ask fifteen hundred people what they think without designing a process that excludes some of the complexity of how we each see the world. Survey researchers wield a significant amount of power in designing questionnaires, establishing the frames through which people will be able to express their opinions, and then in picking story lines out of the piles of numbers that emerge from the interview process. Like any human-designed tool of measurement, survey research has its biases. (Although it is less biased than a self-proclaimed "representative" of almost a million people speaking on the evening news. And it is certainly less biased than a handful of young men plotting violence "on behalf" of their coreligionists.) The question of bias is not easily dismissed, especially when one is trying to create a portrait of a

minority group that might be hard to reach because of language or geographic distribution or socio-economic status and not experienced in expressing their views and values to strangers calling them on the telephone without advanced notice or a proper introduction. The holy grail for me as a pollster is to produce data that has been gathered through a thoughtful, rigorous processand is therefore accepted as valid, so that the data become a solid empirical platform for flexible, creative discussion. People may derive a huge array of conclusions from the same survey data, and this is satisfying because the data have advanced the discussion in some way; but if the discussion drifts into squabbling about methodology, the big pictureand the value of the studyare lost. A representative sample of a larger population is a powerful means of giving voice to ordinary people, and, despite its imperfections, it is one of the most accurate means we have of understanding our society and the sub-groups that constitute it. The collective voice of a group, expressed through survey data, is an illuminating contribution to many social and policy debates. Just as we need public intellectuals to explain, frame, and contextualize, we need some way to access the voices of ordinary people so they are not misrepresented or co-opted by those whose interests are served by the claim that "the people" support them whether in a mature democracy or an emerging democracy. Although the survey of Canadian Muslims was the first major project of the Environics Institute, perhaps our most ambitious project has been the Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study (UAPS). I believe it is this study that is the strongest example to date of the kind of role survey data might play in our national conversation in the years to come. The Environics Institute wanted to amplify the voices of Aboriginal people living in Canadian cities, since this is a large and growing population but one that seems to take up very little space in our national dialogue and imagination. Few institutional leaders give voice to the perspective of this half of the countrys Aboriginal population, as urban Aboriginal people themselves told us in the survey when we asked who, if anyone, spoke for them effectively. We were determined to at least get a good snapshot of Aboriginal

peoples in Canadas cities to lend some visibility to this group, not just for nonAboriginal Canadians, but for Aboriginal peoples themselves both in urban and rural settings, including reserves. We spent two years working with an advisory circle of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics and expertsand implementing substantive changes to the methodology designin order to ensure that our sample would be credible. We spent several more months working with an Aboriginal coding firm (to ensure that respondents' verbatim statements were faithfully represented in our analytical frameworks) and reflecting on the findings with our advisory circle and other experts.2 The worst case scenario for this study would have been the rejection of the data: to have three years, thousands of thoughtful interviews, and hundreds of thousands of dollars be consumed in bickering about statistical details. Only by taking those details seriously could we arrive at a study where the vast majority of commentatorsincluding the main National Aboriginal Organizations and an array of respected academicsacknowledged the validity of the data, and could then use the numbers to spark rich discussions about the experiences, identities, values, and aspirations of Aboriginal peoples living in Canadian cities. The UAPS is now a presenceI might even say a voice or a set of voicesin the Canadian conversation, especially among those who are engaged with Aboriginal issues. It is a catalyst for debate and policy ideas, and it is a mirror in which the over half a million Aboriginal people living in Canadian cities can see themselves and think about who they are becoming and where they fit into a larger social picture. My role in this study was to convene subject area experts and to participate in a process whereby we slowly arrived at a study and a data set we collectively saw as valid, original, and important. Although participating in this studyand to a lesser extent speaking and

Research has a fraught history among Aboriginal peoples in Canada. There is a long history of non-Aboriginal researchers studying Aboriginal peoples without appropriate consultation and without sharing the data they have gathered, often in order to impose paternalistic "solutions" on the population that has been studied.

writing about ithas been a source of immense professional satisfaction to me, my main job in this study and in the rest of the work of the Institute is not the work of a public intellectual, but of a convenor and intermediary, maybe even a knowledge impresario. My role has been to offer others, some of them public intellectuals--from John Ralston Saul to Tom Flanagan to Calvin Helin to David Newhouse--a foundation of data from which to formulate ideas and arguments about how to support Aboriginal peoples as they strive for success in our cities and beyond. I was once told by an eminent Canadian who thought I was a little too free-wheeling in my own commentary about survey data that I should keep my mouth shut and let the numbers speak for themselves. Keeping my mouth shut has never much appealed, and the numbers don't speak for themselvesthey need to have a story told about them, someone to connect the dots. (As the business journalist Alan Webber has put it, Facts are facts; stories are how we learn.) But as I move into the next phase of my career, I am increasingly focused on generating good numbers about which others can tell their own stories and develop their own theories. In my own career, I have gone from wanting to share insights about public attitudes with expert clients, to wanting to share those insights with the general public, to wanting to generate good data and help others find insight and value in the numbers. I will continue to offer my analyses of the latest polling numbers and certainly of our social values data, but my analyses will coexist with those of many others. Getting on TV with the most interesting numbers was once a sought-after objective among me and my peers, and having great fresh data to share is still a thrill. But in a networked age of information overload, announcing numbers through broadcast media does not have the power it once did to get attention and spark dialogue and even change. Public engagement processes like the one the Environics Institute is currently undertaking to share UAPS data with urban Aboriginal communities across the country, now seem more likely to turn numbers into ideas and action.

As I write these words in the fall of 2010, I cannot help but reflect on the current context in this country. Survey research and program evaluation by the federal government is down from $30 million to $8 million; all government departments are banned from subscribing to syndicated tracking studies that enabled public servants to understand social change (and me to write my books about evolving attitudes and values). Most recently, Canadians have been informed of the replacement of the compulsory long form with a voluntary Census in 2011. (The 2006 Census, incidentally, allowed us to develop a sampling plan for the Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study.) The effect of this decision will not be felt tomorrow but it will be felt in the years ahead as policy think tanks, academics, and public servants find they do not have reliable data to know if our social and economic life and particlarly that of vulnerable minorities (new Canadians, young Canadians, poor Canadians, Aboriginal peoples, visible minorities, Canadians with disabilities) is improving or deteriorating. In effect, we are currently being asked: Why should a society try to know itself? If public policy debates descend into conflicting opinions devoid of sound data, our public agora will look more like the comedy and tragedy of the Rush Limbaugh show and every debate will be just a matter of your anecdote and opinion versus mine. (As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.) Public intellectuals, private citizens, and others are now faced with the question of what constitutes intellectual leadership in a climate where information and expertise are themselves being undermined. This is a long way from the dream of the German mathematician and philosopher Leibniz, whose faith in the rational was so deep that he hoped for a future in which when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.